Monthly Archive for August, 2007

The games that didn’t make it Part 1: Rain

Published on August 31, 2007 in Postmortems and The games that didn't make it. 0 Comments

rain game screenshotWhen you make games the way I do, using quick prototypes to test out ideas, it a natural consequence that not all of them work out. Some turn out great (Hovercrafty, dingding and even isotope2) some do become games, original, but maybe not all that good in the long run (Moonlumber and to some extent flashbombs). Then there’s the rest, the ones that don’t even make it into a complete game. It may be for a multitude of reasons, but most often it’s because they’re not fun enough.

I have a couple of these lying around, and I figured I might aswell write a bit about them. The first one is “rain”. Most my games get a short name like that while I make them, Eater of Worlds was called slingshot, flashbombs was called bounce and dingding was called grid.

This uses the Boids style simulation from Popeatron to make a cloud, it looks really nice, but with one drawback. It’s horribly slow.I could probably speed it up quite a lot using stuff I’ve learned since then, but would still be a waste of processing power to do the cloud like that.

It does controls quite nice, the cloudlike feel is there when you’re moving it about. This is one of those things that worked as a toy, but where I had real trouble finding the gameplay.

I tried playing around with mouse gestures since I didn’t want to get keyboard controls in there, the mouse is so much nicer. So, by “massaging” the cloud you can make it rain, and if you move the mouse a bit faster in one direction you’ll make a lightning bolt.

And that’s about it. I never found a way to make it into a game without making it overly complicated. Instead I moved on to make Eater of Worlds.

The game is after the break.
Continue reading ‘The games that didn’t make it Part 1: Rain’

Finding the game.

Published on August 24, 2007 in News and Rant. 0 Comments

Whale game development thumbnailThe way I make games is that first I make a prototype (this is prototyprally after all). Using that I try to find an amusing mechanic, something that makes you smile when you play with it. Normally this isn’t actually all that hard, especially when you’re doing something with physics as it tends to be reasonably emergent. With some fiddling you can find a few interesting mechanics without too much hassle.
The hard part is making it more than a toy.

This is where I’m at with this game now. It’s pretty fun as a toy, and it’s great fun to spawn in a hundred boats and just smash them, but it’s not quite a game yet. But it’ll get there.

My biggest problem right now is resisting the urge to add in even more complicated stuff, blooming and motion blur are two things I’m pretty confident I could put in there without completely killing performance. I’ve also had some problems with my constraint system (used for ropes and such) so that would need a slight rewrite too. But if I’m to complete this within the coming weeks I can’t do that stuff, I need to focus on the actual game.

And once the game’s done there’s menus, possibly high scores and that whole thing. And that takes alot of time, I learned that the hard way for Eater of Worlds, it was supposed to take five weeks, but the highscores and challenge system took two whole weeks on their own pushing the development time to seven weeks total.

Well. Enough with the whining. FlashDevelop, which I plugged in my last post is truly awesome. I hope to be able do a quick little tutorial for how to setup the whole thing for game development.

More balls.

Published on August 14, 2007 in News. 0 Comments

Whalegame I’ve been fiddling around with a new game in past few weeks. It’s built of that ball physics prototype I posted, but with tons of improvements.
I’ve been making this game as a little AS3 playground, there’s been no real “push” to finish it, allowing me to do whatever I feel like.
So, I’ve managed to cram in framerate independent physics (within reason of course), a nice object oriented structure, linked lists for keeping track of the balls and I’ve also moved the project from Flash CS3 to the much more pleasant FlashDevelop.
I’m not sure what Adobe did to the CS3 gui, but it’s horribly slow. Especially on my three year old laptop. In principle CS3 is better for editing code, but for some reason Adobe didn’t go that extra mile making it usable for larger projects.

So, when speeding through the Google reader the other day I saw that jayisgames is having a new competition. About ball physics. And not only that, Jay himself actually popped by to remind me. So I guess I’m entering.
Experience has taught me that promising things beforehand about stuff you’re coding is doomed to end in disaster, so I’ll stress the guess here.